History’s Curse Has Been Altered

So where was it written that the seams of the universe would come undone, with great dynasties toppling and life as we know it changing irretrievably, if and when the Red Sox ever won the World Series?

Nostradamus? Not quite. Scholars have looked into it. Turns out Ol’ Gloom N’ Doom was more of a Cubs man.

Notre Dame? Sorry. The golden domers had one prophecy to get right all year -- And in the twelfth month, as it is his destiny, Urban Meyer shall inherit the football program -- and punted it.

George Steinbrenner? For years, he had a bad feeling about this, which is why he kept buying up all the free agents. It was for insurance. However, like the rest of us, he never really believed it could happen.

Now that it has, take a look at realigned sports reality circa late 2004.

A Red Sox World Series victory in October, apocalypse now:

NBA: Chaos inside The Palace at Auburn Hills as Pistons, Pacers and fans engage in the worst fight in league history.

NHL: Everybody’s locked out.

NFL: Nearly everybody entered Christmas weekend still eligible for the playoffs.

MLB: Leaked testimony about leaking syringes confirmed our worst suspicions. The current state of the old national pastime? Better baseball through chemistry.

NASCAR: Star stock-car driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. is docked 25 points in the standings for uttering a curse word during a live post-race television interview. Next, boxing starts penalizing boxers for bleeding.

Olympics: Doing what they can to repair frayed international relations, U.S. track and field athletes pull out of the Athens Games for mysterious reasons (see “MLB”), allowing many other nations to win medals.

College football: Where being No. 1 really doesn’t make you No. 1 (USC in January) and winning all your games doesn’t get you anywhere (Auburn and Utah today).

College basketball: Rick Majerus holds two news conferences within one week at USC. His speech writer: Groucho Marx. “Hello, I must be going. I cannot stay, I came to say, I must be going.”

Tennis: No Grand Slam titles for either Williams sister. Three Grand Slam titles to Russians Myskina, Sharapova and Kuznetsova.

Golf: Phil. Mickelson. Wins. The. Masters.

Welcome to the new sports world order, whether we’re ready for it or not, a place where:

* The Yankees become the first non-hockey team in the history of major American sports to blow a 3-0 lead in a playoff series.

* The Lakers’ “Team of the ‘00s” campaign goes Howard Dean in the middle of Year Five, leaving pieces scattered from Miami to Montana and turning Kobe Bryant from Kid Charisma to Kids, Don’t Copy.

* The men’s basketball team from the United States (leading exports: automobiles, action movies, men’s basketball) loses to Puerto Rico, Lithuania and Argentina in the Olympics, turning its brief yet altogether-too-long stay in Greece into the Bronze Age.

* An Olympic Games tainted by drug scandal is saved by the feel-good story of American swimmer Michael Phelps, who wins six gold medals and eight overall, returns home a national hero and is charged with driving under the influence.

* Former “Tower of Power” bassist Victor Conte becomes the biggest mover and shaker in U.S. sports, his BALCO lab and “20/20” interview low-bridging the reputations -- and possibly the records -- of the nation’s most famous male and female athletes, Barry Bonds and Marion Jones.

* Drew Brees, the quarterback the Chargers didn’t want, becomes a Pro Bowl player and the Chargers, the team Eli Manning didn’t want, become AFC West champions.

* The New England Patriots win 21 consecutive games and Peyton Manning throws for 49 touchdowns and the NFL’s biggest news stories of the year involve Janet Jackson’s right breast and Nicollette Sheridan’s dropped towel.

* The Tampa Bay Lightning wins the (last?) Stanley Cup, a harried editor at the hometown newspaper hits the wrong button on deadline and the next day’s Tampa Tribune runs an editorial commiserating over the Lightning’s noble defeat at the hands of the newly crowned NHL “champion” Calgary Flames.

* The NHL shuts down for four months, possibly for an entire season, possibly longer, and Phoenix Coyote President Doug Moss says it’s great for business. “We will have our best financial performance in years,” Moss predicts when the lockout begins in September. “It may be the best in the franchise’s history.”

* For the first time in 86 years, the Red Sox are World Series champions, overcoming a 3-0 deficit to the Yankees in the American League championship series to reach the Series, then sweeping the St. Louis Cardinals.*

(*We cannot rightly call the Red Sox “world champions,” however. Not when Cuba, Australia and Japan finish 1-2-3 in the Olympic baseball tournament. The United States did not qualify for the Olympics. However, the Netherlands did.)

And a great silence falls over Red Sox Nation.

For the first time in 8 1/2 decades, Red Sox fans have nothing to complain about.

Strange Changes

In the year the Red Sox won the World Series, so much tradition and routine were rendered unrecognizable.

For the first time in 44 years, the notion of an October Freeway Series actually reached the onramp. For the first time, the Angels and the Dodgers qualified for the playoffs in the same season.

They didn’t get very far, finishing a combined 1-6 against the Red Sox and the Cardinals. But let it be written: In 2004, the Dodgers won a playoff game for the first time in 16 years and the Angels reached the postseason for the second time in three years.

How did ownership commemorate these momentous achievements?

The Dodgers let National League most valuable player runner-up Adrian Beltre escape to Seattle and nearly traded Shawn Green and Brad Penny to Arizona before a fans’ revolt gave General Manager Paul DePodesta enough pause to eventually back out of the deal and save some face, namely his own. You keep giving away good players, Milton Bradley is going to want to punch somebody.

Angel owner Arte Moreno antagonized his newly energized Orange County fan base by threatening to change the team’s name to the “Los Angeles Angels,” or the “Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim,” or the “Los Angeles Poulan Weed-Eater Angels of Anaheim Presented By AT&T.;”

The Lakers’ starting lineup on Christmas Day was Chris Mihm, Jumaine Jones, Lamar Odom, Chucky Atkins and Kobe Bryant. Shaquille O’Neal played for the visitors, the Miami Heat. Phil Jackson was off somewhere working on the rough draft of his new book, “More Bad Stuff About Kobe.” Karl Malone was faxing in the foreword. Gary Payton was in Boston, on the Internet, contemplating his next stop in his quest for a championship ring: EBay.

The Lakers lost that game, in overtime, when Bryant’s forced three-pointer over a double team didn’t fall. (OK, some things haven’t changed.) The loss left the Lakers 14-12 in the Pacific Division, barely ahead of the Clippers, 8 1/2 games behind the Phoenix Suns, seventh overall in the Western Conference.

After an embarrassing five-game defeat to Detroit in the NBA Finals, the Lakers underwent a most extreme makeover -- going in as the league’s Place To Be, going under the knife and coming out, disfigured, as No Man’s Land.

O’Neal no longer wanted to play with Bryant. Jackson no longer wanted to coach Bryant. Bryant became an off-season free agent. He flirted with but ultimately spurned the Clippers, who had no good answer for one key question: Donald Sterling or Jerry Buss?

Derek Fisher, whose last-fraction-of-a-second basket helped eliminate San Antonio in the Western Conference semifinals, is now a Golden State Warrior.

Troy Percival, Troy Glaus and David Eckstein, who helped the Angels win their increasingly incredible 2002 World Series championship, are now, respectively, a Detroit Tiger, an Arizona Diamondback and a St. Louis Cardinal.

Steve Finley, whose ninth-inning grand slam against San Francisco gave the Dodgers their first division title since 1995, is now an Angel.

Eric Gagne, Dodger bullpen monster, is now human, his consecutive save streak ending at 85 in July.

Pedro Martinez, longtime Boston hero, now plays for New York. Red Sox fans have been able to cope only through the consolation that Pedro went to the other league, to the Mets, unlike Roger Clemens, who played for the Yankees, with whom he won a Cy Young Award in 2001 before retiring in 2003 and winning another Cy Young Award in 2004 with the Houston Astros.

Ben Roethlisberger -- not Eli Manning, not Philip Rivers -- won his first 13 starts as a professional quarterback, helping the Pittsburgh Steelers to the best record in the NFL.

Greece -- not Italy, not Germany, not France, not England -- won the European Soccer Championship.

The Yankees -- not the Red Sox -- threw away a 3-0 lead in the American League championship series.

New Math

Another change: After 28 years in the booth, Ross Porter is let go by the Dodgers and replaced with Charley Steiner. In Porter’s honor, a few statistics:

0: Grand Slam golf tournaments won by Tiger Woods in 2004.

0.4: Seconds left on the clock for Derek Fisher to sink San Antonio.

1: USC’s football ranking in the final Associated Press poll following the Trojans’ 28-14 Rose Bowl triumph over Michigan. That, however, was not enough to earn USC the bowl championship series title, which went to LSU, which defeated Oklahoma, 21-14, in the Sugar Bowl. The BCS’ nadir? At the time, we could only hope.

2: Number of Triple Crown races won by Smarty Jones, who made the cover of Sports Illustrated and thereafter lost the Belmont to Birdstone.

3: Number of BCS conference teams with undefeated records at the end of the 2004 regular season. Sorry, Auburn.

4: Number of so-called “certain Hall of Famers” in the Lakers’ 2003-2004 lineup, which failed to win the NBA championship.

5: Number of victories so far in Joe Gibbs’ second coming in Washington.

6: Lance Armstrong’s record number of consecutive victories in the Tour de France.

6-6: UCLA’s football record during Karl Dorrell’s second season as coach, including a Las Vegas Bowl defeat to Wyoming. Dorrell did, however, keep the USC game close, which earned him a contract extension.

0-6: Eli Manning’s record as the New York Giants’ starting quarterback.

8: Golf tournaments won by Annika Sorenstam in 2004.

8-0: The Red Sox’ postseason record after losing Game 3 of the ALCS to the Yankees, 19-8.

0-8: Tony La Russa’s managerial record in his last eight World Series games.

8-8: Mediocrity personified. Except in the NFC, where as many as three 8-8 teams could advance to the Super Bowl tournament.

12: After expansion, number of Major League Soccer teams, including a new cross-the-yard rival for the Galaxy, Chivas USA.

12-0: USC’s football record during the regular season, which helped earn Matt Leinart the Heisman Trophy, matching Carson Palmer’s feat in 2002.

18.5 to 9.5: Score by which the United States loses the Ryder Cup, again.

21: The New England Patriots’ NFL record for consecutive victories.

25: ESPN turned 25 in 2004. You might have heard something about it.

49: Peyton Manning’s NFL record for touchdown passes in a season.

73: Games Indiana Pacer Ron Artest will sit out as a result of his suspension for his part in the Nov. 19 Pacers-Pistons-paying customers melee.

80: Steve Largent’s retired Seattle Seahawk jersey number, until Jerry Rice joins the team and asks Largent and the team to unretire it. Unmitigated Gall 1, Class 0.

262: A better moment for Seattle -- Ichiro Suzuki’s major-league single-season hit record.

1918: Before 2004, the year of the Red Sox’ last World Series title. May we never have to see or hear those numbers again.

2005: USC is No. 1 in the AP football poll again. This time, the Trojans will play in the championship game, next Tuesday’s Orange Bowl, against Oklahoma, winner take all. (Sorry, Auburn.) It’s a start.